After the hurricane

After the hurricane, he called, urging us to come home. Our generator is running fine, he said, the grocery stores are already opened back up, gas won’t be a problem because I could always get it for you at the refinery. Mostly he was worried about the expense of continuing to stay in a hotel, but I convinced myself too, that I heard loneliness in his voice. He wanted us home. In his job in refining, he is last-out-first-back. He evacuated just as the hurricane hit, and only went two hours away to ride it out where the company had set him up in a motel. We went further, all the way to Dallas, and talked to him every few hours as the storm was blasting along the coast.

But I wasn’t ready to go back. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I think now that I didn’t want to go back to life-as-usual because nothing was usual. Nothing had been for seven months. After the move (from Memphis to Beaumont), the baby (number six, a girl, a joyful event, but stressful nonetheless), the diabetes (my two year old daughter diagnosed all of two days after her sister was born), all striking in three weeks, I no longer believed in usual. Or, perhaps it is better to admit that I hated what my “usual” had become. I stalled for a day, but I did go, taking my six kids on the six hour drive back to the place that was still barely home, arriving in a ghost-town so empty even the kids noticed the eeriness.

After the hurricane, our town was so battered that for weeks I would be driving around and notice some new damage I hadn’t seen before. A stop sign bent backwards, billboards ripped in half, fences blown over, blue tarps on roofs up and down the streets, a tree across someone’s lawn. For months the Autoplex sign read “A to pley.”

What I couldn’t see, what I didn’t yet understand, what how battered I was inside. It took months of just surviving, one foot in front of the other, forcing myself out of bed each day to tend to the most basic needs of my family, before I would notice some new damage I hadn’t seen before. Constant tiredness no matter how much sleep I got. Not laughing at . . . . well, not laughing. Undeserved irritability toward my children. A growing gulf between myself and my husband. Small tasks seeming overwhelming. Things not as easily repaired as fences and roofs.

It is hurricane season here again. Instead of leaving broken pieces and debris, why can’t the storm come through in a cleansing blast of wind and pounding, purifying rain? For that, I would stay. I would stand out in the street and wait while it ripped through my heart, swirled ‘round every little crevice of my mind, til wet and tired I would see that it had stopped, that all was still, and clean, and whole. And I would smile . . . after the hurricane.

Wired

Along the busy street outside my subdivision the trees are forced to grow in grotesque shapes away from the telephone/electrical wires. In their winter nakedness this is exposed in ways I’m shocked to have never noticed, though of course I’ve seen before how trees are trimmed in awkward shapes to keep them clear of the wires snaking along from pole to pole. (As a child, roadtripping with your family, did you ever lean your head just right, and watch the wires loop-loop-looping, dividing, reconnecting, keeping pace with the car?) And now that I am noticing, I see the wires and their wooden poles, standing in lines like scarecrow-soldiers — except here, where they’re more drunken in their post-hurricane leaning — everywhere. Something that blends into the background. Always there, never seen. And ahead, their metal-poled counterparts, with trios of wires stacked and still snaking through the freeway-side landscape.

Our lives are bent in a grotesque dance, snaking over around and through computers, tvs, telephones, ipods, radio, internet, Nintendo. Wired or wireless we are constantly connected. My children never lean their heads lazily to watch out the window of the car. They hunch over hand-held gaming devices, or stare blankly at the built in DVD player, wireless earphones piping Disney straight to their ears, while the car speakers play my favorite radio station.

we give them something to gawk at

Living in Laie can make you feel like a fish in an aquarium.  Tour buses come into our tropical little town a couple times a day to gawk at the natives.  Haha.  I kid.  Actually, they just want to get a view of our gorgeous temple, PCC, and BYU-Hawaii; and since we live a stones throw (if you can throw with great force) from all of these locations we frequently encounter many a bus on our daily jaunts about town.

I actually don’t really notice anymore.

It wasn’t until yesterday, when I saw a PCC tour bus of several tourists of the Asian and maninland variety rubberneck their way down our street that I realized me and my band of babes were the main attraction.

I even saw a few camera flashes go off.

And it made me come upon a halting, hilarious, incredulous realization: my life is kind of odd to the everyday human.  Or is it?

If you consider a barely 26 year old woman, walking down a street lined with towering palm trees, holding a black-eyed scrappy baby on her hip who is absent-mindedly tooting a hot-orange recorder at his high-pitched singing brother, who is sitting in a red wagon full of food for his friends family who just had a new baby a rare sight…

…then yeah, we warrant a few stares and maybe even a camera flash, but what are they gonna need that picture for and what are they gonna see when they finally load their memory card onto their computer two years later (if they’re anything like my parents- hehe)?

I bet if they looked back at pictures of themselves as young mothers and fathers they wouldn’t see something too different.

We’re all just getting through this tiring, hilarious, and exhilarating stage with as much patience and fun as we can… palm trees or not.